inXile's first game, an action RPG remake of the classic dungeon crawler The Bard's Tale, recently got released on PC, and Gamespot PC have their review of it ready. They didn't like it so much and rate it 6.7/10, which, on the 6-10 scale major sites use, means it's pretty weak.

But, even though The Bard's Tale would like to mock the conventions of wizards, warriors, dungeons, and dragons, it ultimately ends up relying on the things it's supposedly trying to make fun of. Most of the people you meet, places you visit, and enemies you encounter wouldn't be at all out of place in a straitlaced high-fantasy RPG, but here it makes the somewhat halfhearted humor often feel like an afterthought. There are a few genuinely funny moments, though they're usually because of the talented voice-acting cast rather than the writing. There are scores of missed opportunities for puns and silly names, and yet the game manages to find the time for a head-shakingly out-of-place reference to You Got Served.

That's a thing that also bugged me in Troika's Bloodlines, which had a couple of George W. Bush jokes that won't be relevant anymore in a few years.